A CRASH COURSE

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A CRASH COURSE A SHORT
STORY
What you need to know about Elizabethan
playhouses and how I got interested in them
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A short history of the playhouses

• The first one, The Theatre, opened in 1576.
• It was adapted from an animal-baiting arena, or
  its design was based on such arenas.
• They found some of its foundations (or a drain?)
  last week.

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The design of the playhouses

• They were usually large multi-sided polygonal
  structures (Shakespeares wooden O), with three
  levels of galleries around a central courtyard.
• The stage was not in the middle of the yard,
  because human beings are smarter than animals and
  want to be able to orient their performance
  rather than performing through 360 degrees.
• So it was a thrust stage, with most of the
  audience out front and to the sides.

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A recycled playhouse

• In 1598 Shakespeares company had a dispute with
  their landlord at The Theatre.
• Between Christmas and New Year, when the landlord
  couldnt get an injunction to stop them, they
  snuck in and dismantled the timber structure.
• They transported it across the Thames on barges,
  and rebuilt it as the first Globe.

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Playhouses are fire-traps

• This first Globe, the playhouse for which
  Shakespeare wrote most of his plays, burnt down
  during a performance in 1613.
• Cotton wadding from a sound effects cannon
  ignited the thatched roof.
• The second Globe was built immediately on the
  same site, probably on the same foundations.
• It had a tiled roof

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The evidence

• We dont have good evidence of what the
  playhouses were like inside.
• but there are numerous representations of their
  outsides.
• One of the most famous is Wenzel Hollars 1630s
  sketch of the second Globe.

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One of Hollars sketches from the tower of
Southwark Cathedral
The second Globe
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Londons Globe reconstruction

• The third Globe is substantially based on this
  sketch of the second Globe.
• But it is attempting to reconstruct the first
  Globe (frankly, thats a bit of a worry!).
• Many scholars feel it is too big, due to
  misreadings of some of the evidence.

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Why physical reconstruction?

• Apart from Desdemonaland for the tourists.
• To enable theatre historians to do bodily
  re-tracing.
• To get a better sense of how the plays would have
  worked in performance.
• To enrich our interpretation of the texts.

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In tandem with textual reconstruction

• For me, play-texts are literate artifacts
  embedded in oral and physical production
  processes processes of which the texts are
  often the only remnant.
• I assume their playwrights were inscribing those
  processes in their texts
• so they are marked by those processes.
• They are my main means of reconstructing
  performance. An example Richard III.

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Richard III, 1.1 jagged lines

• Glou. Now is the winter of our discontent
• Made glorious summer by this son of York
• And all the clouds that loured upon our house
• In the deep bosom of the ocean buried.

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• Glou. Now is the winter of our discontent
• Made glorious summer by this son of York
• And all the clouds that loured upon our house
• In the deep bosom of the ocean buried.

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If my assumptions are valid,

• It means the texts can be analysed for evidence
  of performance conditions.
• It means the playwright is re-positioned as
  practical professional rather than literary
  author.
• It means that if the text is (also) literature,
  it is literature in which the meanings are being
  made spatially as well as verbally an example
  from Romeo and Juliet.

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Juliets bed and tomb

• Juliet. O sweet my mother, cast me not away!
• Delay this marriage for a month, a week,
• Or if you do not, make the bridal bed
• In that dim monument where Tybalt lies.
• 
  (3.5.198-201)
• Juliet. How if, when I am laid into the tomb,
• I wake before the time that Romeo
• Come to redeem me? Theres a fearful point!
  
• (4.3.30-32)
• Romeo. Ah, dear Juliet,
• Why art thou yet so fair? Shall I believe
• That unsubstantial Death is amorous,
• And that the lean abhorred monster keeps
• Thee here in dark to be his paramour?
• (5.3.101-5)

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If text analysis can help us under-stand the
performance spaces

• then the performance spaces can help us
  understand the texts.
• So the more we know about the performance spaces
  the better
• what shape was the stage?
• how many entrance-points did it have?
• how did it relate to the auditorium?
• what other features did it have?

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Thats the crash course. Now the short story of
how I got into this.

• In the 1980s, an accidental discovery
• In 1995 at the third Globe
• An obsession with Hollars sketch
• The Helsinki incident, 2006